“Well, that might be overstating the case a bit, but I’ve had an encounter or two with the sort of injuries that start out numb then hurt later—and the numbness usually lasts until the anesthesia kicks in.”
He gave Treena a do-you-think-she’s-buying-it grimace, and she knew he was just making it up as he went along. But it seemed to be working, for Carly nodded wearily without opening her eyes. She even smiled slightly.
“That’s good to know,” she whispered. “I’m a baby when it comes to pain.”
“Then you’ll want to be sure to ask them to prescribe something you can take before the numbing agent wears off,” Jax advised gently.
His thigh brushed Treena’s as he settled back in his chair and her nipples immediately beaded and she went all tight and achy inside. That was a first, she thought. She didn’t usually feel this way about a man after making out. But then she’d never experienced anything quite as intense as the time she’d spent on the couch with Jax. Nor had men ever stuck around long once she’d disappointed them. And if they didn’t take off, she wanted nothing more than to run for the hills. She’d certainly never actually anticipated round two.
She reached out and took Carly’s free hand in her own, lacing their fingers together in hopes of anchoring her thoughts in something more appropriate to the situation and setting. But she couldn’t seem to quit sneaking sidelong glances at Jax. Before the phone had blasted everything else from her mind, she’d been in post-orgasmic bliss. She’d had her hand boldly down Jax’s pants and for the first time in ages she’d felt the throbbing heat of a hard penis beneath her palm.
Then she’d been jerked from the boneless, lethargic haze of her own pleasure into Carly’s kitchen, with its trail of browning droplets spattered across the light vinyl floor between the sink and the phone. Her friend had been on the verge of hysteria, the dogs and cats had all been milling about adding to the confusion, and she’d had next to no time to pull her scattered wits together. Only Jax’s calming presence had helped ground her as she’d settled Carly down and pressed a clean towel to her deep wound before bundling her friend into Jax’s rental car for the drive to the hospital.
And now that she had the leisure to sort through her emotions, she couldn’t. So many scrambled through her system. She felt satiated, because she had never experienced an orgasm that was even close to the one Jax had given her. Guilty because she’d left him high and dry. Sorry, considering how great the preliminaries had been, they had missed the main event. Worried that it would have been every bit as disappointing as she’d come to expect if they had brought it to the conclusion they’d been steaming toward before the interruption.
Finally she regretted that poor Carly had to sit in a crowded emergency room so long with a sliced up hand, and she was ashamed that her friend’s welfare wasn’t even close to the top of her concerns.
“Omigawd, the babies!” Carly’s eyes abruptly snapped open, and she raised her head away from the wall, tension radiating from the suddenly stiff set of her shoulders. “I was going to feed them as soon as I finished the dishes, but seeing my own blood drove it clean out of my head. They’re probably climbing the walls by now.”
Treena rose to her feet. “I left without my cell phone, but I’ll find a land line and call Mack to see if he’ll feed them for you.”
“Ask him if he’ll take Buster and Rufus out to do their biz, too.”
“Gotcha.”
“Here.” Jax stood, as well, and pulled his cell phone from his pocket. He held it out to her. “You don’t have to look for a phone. You can use mine.”
“Even better.” She studied his face, which was momentarily close enough to her own for their breaths to commingle, and her heart performed a slow roll in her chest. He hadn’t whined once about being so abruptly cut off just when he was about to reap his sexual reward. He had been, in fact, nothing short of wonderful. But he’d also been much quieter than usual, and she wondered what he really thought about all that had happened today. Operating on impulse, she stretched up to plant a quick kiss on his lips. “Thank you,” she said, settling back on her heels. “For everything.” She took the phone. “I’ll just take this outside where it’s quieter.”
She talked to Mack minutes later and once she explained the situation he was ready to take care of the babies that very minute. With an admonishment to tell Carly not to worry about a thing, to simply take care of herself, he rang off, leaving Treena smiling.
He was a good friend.
And thinking how comforting a good friend could be in a situation like this, she dialed Ellen. The older woman was the closest thing she and Carly had to a mom—at least in this state. Moreover, Ellen knew Carly as Carly’s own mother did not, and Treena felt a sudden desire to touch base with her.
The accident spilled out of her the moment Ellen picked up and Ellen’s response immediately soothed her jangled nerves.
“Oh, darling! How awful for her—and for you, too. Where did you take her? Desert Springs?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll be right there.”
“You don’t have to do that.” She tried to sound as if she actually meant it, but in truth Ellen’s stated intention sounded like the best idea she’d heard all day.
“Of course I do.”
“We could be here all night,” she warned Ellen. “They don’t consider her injuries real high on their list of priorities.”
“I don’t care how long it takes,” Ellen said. “Hang tight, sweetheart. I’ll be there in ten minutes. Twenty tops, if traffic is bad.”
The phone went dead.
Treena turned to go back inside, then realized she needed to call work and let them know what was going on. It was unlikely she’d be able to make the eight-o’clock show—and God knew she wasn’t in the greatest mental shape for it even if she could get there in time. But one didn’t simply blow off a performance in la Stravaganza and expect to remain employed. Stepping away from the automatic door, she keyed in the general manager’s number.
A few minutes later she disconnected, and with Vernetta-Grace’s advice to take the rest of the night off, she went back through the E.R. doors, hit anew by the scents and sounds of humanity awaiting help. Codes were called over the loudspeaker, children cried or ran around un-checked, and adults yelled for attention or simply slumped quietly in their institutional chairs, as they waited to be taken back into the mysterious depths of the E.R.
She took her seat between Carly and Jax once again. “Mack said to tell you he’s ‘on it’ and not to worry about anything except getting yourself fixed up.”
“He’s such a sweetie.”
“Yeah. And Ellen’s on her way.”
“Oh, bless her, bless her, bless her!”
Treena laughed. “Now Carly, don’t hold it all in where it can fester and spread its poison. Tell us how you really feel.”
The blonde smiled wanly. “You know that I regress when I’m sick or hurt. Well, I really need a mommy fix right now. Oh, not my mom’s brand of mothering. But Ellen is just what the doctor ordered.” Her lips, more accustomed to smiling than sneering, curled witheringly. “Or would be, I’m sure, if I could only get in to see one.”
“Ellen’s the best,” Treena agreed. She gave her friend a gentle jostle with her elbow. “Hey, maybe she’ll bring cookies.”
She didn’t, but she did bring immediate comfort. Striding into the E.R. waiting area a brief while later, Ellen promptly zeroed in on their little threesome. Clad in one of the colorful tops she’d bought during their shopping spree yesterday—this one a pretty purple with enough gray in it to accentuate the silver in her salt-and-pepper hair—she swept up to Carly and leaned forward to give her a careful hug. As she straightened she brushed a spike of the younger woman’s hair back from her forehead. “Are you all right? You’re terribly pale.”
“I’m kinda freaked,” Carly admitted. “But I’m not too bad, really. It doesn’t hurt, and Jax says it probably won’t if they give me s
omething to take before the numbness wears off. Anyhow, I’m doing okay as long as I don’t think about it too closely. I don’t like blood, and I really don’t like seeing skin split open to reveal the inner workings. Especially my own.”
“I’m sure you don’t.” Ellen took a seat on the other side of her. “If you’d cared to view that sort of thing you probably would have become a nurse instead of a dancer.”
“Exactly!”
Treena had known Ellen would be the antidote they needed. The older woman brought a natural warmth and bedrock common sense to every situation.
Jax suddenly climbed to his feet, and she swung around to stare up at him.
“Look,” he said, thrusting his hands in his pants pockets as he looked back at her. “As long as Ellen is here, would you mind if I took off?” He glanced beyond her at the retired librarian. “That is, if you don’t object to seeing them both home?”
“No, of course I don’t.”
Treena climbed to her feet, as well, feeling uncharacteristically awkward, as if she were suddenly all arms and legs without a flexible joint between them. Damn. He was angry with her. He’d simply been too well-mannered to leave her and Carly to cope on their own.
“Don’t look like that,” he commanded and, wrapping his fingers around her arm, led her beyond earshot of the other two women.
She stood stiffly within his grasp. “You’re mad at me.”
“No. I’m not. I know what you’re thinking, but this has nothing to do with what happened—or I guess more accurately what didn’t happen—earlier. It’s just that tomorrow is the first day of the tournament, and I need to psyche myself up for it.”
“Oh, my gosh, is that starting already?”
“Yeah. And my process before it begins is to spend a quiet evening dealing with everything that’s been going on in my life so none of it’s on my mind when I play.”
“Uh-huh,” she said, and she couldn’t prevent the slight edge of cynicism that crept into her voice. “So what were you doing at my place, then?”
“I never intended to stay there long. I just thought maybe we could go for a ride or something. Blow the cobwebs free.” He rubbed his hands up and down her arms. “Believe it or not, jumping your bones wasn’t in my game plan. And I really didn’t plan on this.” A tip of his head indicated the teeming waiting room.
Even though she suspected it made her pathetically needy, she was nevertheless soothed by the explanation. It robbed her of the fear that, once again, her sexual performance had driven a man away. “Okay, then.” She tried to step back, but his hands tightened on her arms, and she tilted her head back a bit to look up at him. “Good luck on getting your karma in tune, or whatever. And good luck tomorrow, too.”
“You wanna wish me luck?”
“Of course.”
“Then I’ll take this.” He lowered his head and kissed her. She was barely able to stand on her own two feet by the time he raised his head again. “For luck,” he said, then smiled down at her. “I love seeing that look on your face.”
“Hmm?” She blinked up at him, then made a concerted effort to focus. “What look?”
“That blurry-eyed, ‘Do me’ look.”
A sputter of laughter escaped her, but she jabbed stiffened fingers into his hard gut and faked outrage. “My God, nothing wrong with your ego, is there?”
“Ego’s got nothing to do with it. I just recognize the signs when I see them. And, honey, you’ve got more postings than a military installation. Do me,” he crooned softly in her ear. “Do me, do me, do me.”
She bit the inside of her cheek to forestall the grin she felt building. “Be sure to turn that fat head sideways when you go through the doors,” she advised. “We wouldn’t want you to give yourself a concussion trying to get it through the exit head-on. Though come to think of it, you’re in the right place for it.” She stepped back to study him. “Still, you’ve seen how long it takes to get attention for anyone who’s not bleeding to death, and sitting around while your brain swells against your skull probably won’t improve your game any.”
He laughed. “Man, you don’t give an inch, do you? I’ll call you as soon as I can.”
And before she could muster a single reply, he pulled her to him for another hard kiss, then turned and strode away.
She watched him disappear through the glass doors then wandered back to the area where they’d been waiting. She was almost there before she realized Carly was no longer in her seat.
“Did they finally call her?” she asked, flopping into the chair beside Ellen.
“Yes, once I had a little talk with the triage nurse about this hospital’s so-called fast-track policy for the less acute care patients.”
“You are so amazing. How do you know all these things?”
“A million years’ worth of swimming through the public library system. I know how to research and I worked with the general public for so long that I’ve gotten pretty good at dealing with problems.” She smiled. “And the fact is that Carly should have been sorted to the fast-track area the hospital’s so proud of when she first came in. Only the E.R. had several things hit at once around that time, so she sort of got lost in the shuffle.”
“But I talked to a nurse not too long ago, and she took a look at Carly’s wound. Shouldn’t she have directed us to the right place?”
“Apparently after she checked her out she did see to it that Carly’s chart was moved to the right stack. I just got it moved up a little.”
Treena slumped down and rested her head on the smaller woman’s shoulder. “You’re my hero.”
Ellen laughed. “And my rates are reasonable, too.” They were quiet for a few minutes, then she said softly, “Speaking of which, you said something intriguing yesterday about your preference for foreplay over sex. Would you care to tell Dr. Ellen what you meant?”
Treena slowly sat back up while she battled a knee-jerk impulse to say she’d rather not. The fact was, though, she truly would like to talk to another woman about it—and as close as she was to Carly it was just too embarrassing to admit she wasn’t all that crazy about one of the very things her friend professed to love most. Maybe if she’d come clean about it years ago, she wouldn’t feel so awkward admitting it now. But she’d let the omission go on much too long, and now she didn’t know how to confess without sounding like an idiot. Or worse, like a big, fat liar.
With Ellen, on the other hand, she didn’t have more than a decade-long history of dodging the truth. Plus, the older woman was the least judgmental person she knew, and she turned in her seat to face her. She opened her mouth, then closed it.
“This is embarrassing,” she muttered.
“Ah, darling, no.” Ellen patted her hand. “The last thing I want is to embarrass you.”
“Oh, trust me, you haven’t. I embarrass myself.” She shrugged. “I’m thirty-five years old and presumed by many a man to be the last of the red-hot mamas. That has more to do with me as the dancer than me as the person, I know. But still. When men take me out, they think they’re going to get the night of their life. In reality, I stink at sex.”
MACK CAME TO AN abrupt stop. Whoa. This is not a conversation I want to be involved in. Glad he’d come in through the main hospital entrance and not the E.R. doors where the two women would be more likely to spot him, he stepped back to put a pillar between himself and their line of vision. He watched Ellen reach for Treena’s hand as he tried to decide whether to leave, make a noisy entrance or wait them out.
“Whenever I hear a woman claim full responsibility for bad sexual relations,” Ellen said drily, “I have to wonder if she’s truly at fault, or if it’s simply her choice of partners that stinks?”
“Probably a combination of both,” Treena admitted. “I’ve certainly run into my share of guys who immediately expect stuff from me that I might be willing to do if I knew them a little better. But mostly it’s me, I’m afraid. Like I told you yesterday, I love the kissing and the petting part. B
ut when it comes to the main event, well, I’m sort of a control freak.”
“You like to tell them what to do?”
Treena made a sound that was half snort, half rueful laugh. “No, they’d probably get off on that. I really, really dislike losing control. No doubt my unwillingness to truly cut loose is rooted in all manner of Freudian crap that would single-handedly put some shrink’s kid through college. But I already know the underlying reason.”
“Which is?”
“I learned young that in order to get where I wanted to go, I had to depend on myself. I guess I’m afraid if I ever put myself in someone else’s hands everything will go to hell.” She shrugged. “The bottom line is I slam the brakes on whenever I feel like I’m too close to losing command of my senses.”
She swivelled in her seat to face Ellen. “But you know what? I have a feeling that it might be different with Jax. Things are already…different.” Color washed up her face. “He makes me feel things I didn’t think I was capable of feeling. And he sure makes me forget about keeping the lid on. In fact, if Carly hadn’t called when she did this afternoon—” she hesitated, slanting a peek at Ellen “—well, let’s just say this conversation might have been moot. Long story short: he’d just given me one of the greatest moments of my life. And we were about to test my He-could-be-the-exception-to-my-freezing-up-in-the-main-event theory. Instead he ended up with the short end of the stick.”
Okay, way too much information. Mack took a step forward with every intention of announcing himself and stopping this. It was too discomfiting by half to listen to, too close to overhearing the details of one of his daughters’ sex lives for his peace of mind. He stopped himself, however, because he knew Ellen would put a halt to it at any minute. And there was no use embarrassing the two of them with his presence.
But all she said was, “Is that why he lit out of here so fast when I got here? Was he upset about being left hanging?”
“No. I mean, that’s what I thought at first, too—that maybe, even though he’d been such a rock for us, he was secretly resentful. But he insisted it was strictly because he had to get ready for the first day of his tournament, which starts tomorrow. But, Ellen? For the first time in forever I’m seriously toying with the idea of getting down and dirty with a man. This is a big step for me, and God knows I’ve got enough other problems in my life already to make me think twice. So am I crazy to be considering taking a chance on him?”
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